Greyducks Struggle in Mayor’s Cup to Start Season but Remain Optimistic

As the championship race neared its end on a brisk, sunny day in Van Cortlandt Park, senior and co-captain Min Hein Htet, senior and co-captain Jesse Sit, and junior Justin Zhang crossed the finish line almost in unison, out of breath, but content. Despite finishing 11th out of 24 teams, the Greyducks met their expectations and were pleased with their overall showing.

Heading into the meet, the prestigious NYC Mayor’s Cup, Stuyvesant’s boys’ cross country team, the Greyducks, was not expecting to finish in first or second place. Last year’s team placed 6th at the same event; however, its top three runners, Kiyan Tavangar, Gregory Dudick, and Harvey Ng, have graduated. This was the first race that the varsity team would be running together, so the team’s chemistry and game plan weren’t at their best. For example, senior and co-captain Matt Fairbanks was injured and did not run. Additionally, the team has not yet had enough practices to work on their speed training and hill-running strength. “We’re aiming to peak in early November, so there are some aspects of training that we’ve only just started focusing on,” first-year coach Carl Disarno said. As a result, race times for the Greyducks were slower than usual.

Sophomore Baird Johnson’s time for the 2.5-mile championship race was 14:12.1, though Disarno said that “he certainly didn’t run as fast as he is capable [of running].” Htet placed 55th with a time of 14:50.3, followed closely by Sit in 58th (14:57.8) and Zhang in 59th (15:01.1). Sophomore Oliver Cai (67th), junior Caleb Hoo (68th), and junior Steven Zheng (97th) rounded out the varsity team. Susan Wagner High School won first place in the Mayor’s Cup, while Brooklyn Tech High School and Trinity High School earned second and third place, respectively.

The team was satisfied with its performance and accomplished its goals for the event. “My goal for this meet was to have our second through fifth runners [be] as close to one another as possible, and we only had a 23-second gap between our second and sixth runners, which I thought was great,” Sit said. “Many of us ran PRs [personal records] which is a nice start.”

The Greyducks’ captains are cautiously optimistic about the team’s future. “So far we've been doing a lot of mileage and not as many hard workouts, so in these next few weeks, we’ll be moving towards more workouts to get race ready,” Sit said. He has already set goals for the next event, the Manhattan Invite, which takes place on October 15. He hopes that Johnson’s time will be below 13:30 and that the next three Stuyvesant runners will have sub-14:30 times. Other captains agreed with this: “By the end of the season, I'm confident we'll become faster,” Htet said. “The only way our team is going to have a shot at making states is through a deep team, which means that we need a good quantity of guys who won't lose to anyone except the stars of the rival teams.”

A main concern for the Greyducks is injury, noting that Fairbanks and Johnson are both hurt. The Greyducks “need to improve on injury prevention techniques. They need to understand that taking days off to recover while the problem is still not critical is important,” Htet said.

As the Greyducks look to improve in the next meet, Coach Disarno summed up the team’s 2017 outlook: “I think we have our work cut out for us in order to achieve our goals of winning the Borough Championship and qualifying for the state meet, but it’s not out of our reach.”